ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2019
Multimodal cue integration in the dung beetle compass.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 34 papers.
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Who cites it
34 citing papers in PubMed, 76 citations in OpenAlex.
- Insect phototransduction: illuminating pathways to precision Pest management.Pest management science · 2026Review
- From skylight cues to magnetic fields: the toolkit of insect long-distance navigation.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2026Review
- Bees flexibly adjust decision strategies to information content in a foraging task.Science advances · 2026Article
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- Multimodal cue integration and learning in a neural representation of head direction.Nature neuroscience · 2025Article
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- Spider dung beetles: coordinated cooperative transport without a predefined destination.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Monarch butterflies memorize the spatial location of a food source.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Emergent spatial goals in an integrative model of the insect central complex.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Connectomic reconstruction predicts the functional organization of visual inputs to the navigation center of thebioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- Behavioral responses of free-flying Drosophila melanogaster to shiny, reflecting surfaces.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2023Article
- The role of learning-walk related multisensory experience in rewiring visual circuits in the desert ant brain.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2023Review
- Visual navigation: properties, acquisition and use of views.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2023Review
- A model of cue integration as vector summation in the insect brain.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Development of frequency tuning shaped by spatial cue reliability in the barn owl's auditory midbrain.eLife · 2023Article
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- Visual accelerated and olfactory decelerated responses during multimodal learning in honeybees.Frontiers in physiology · 2023Article
- Varieties of visual navigation in insects.Animal cognition · 2023Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 4 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
South African ball-rolling dung beetles exhibit a unique orientation behavior to avoid competition for food: after forming a piece of dung into a ball, they efficiently escape with it from the dung pile along a straight-line path. To keep track of their heading, these animals use celestial cues, such as the sun, as an orientation reference. Here we show that wind can also be used as a guiding cue for the ball-rolling beetles. We demonstrate that this mechanosensory compass cue is only used when skylight cues are difficult to read, i.e., when the sun is close to the zenith. This raises the question of how the beetles combine multimodal orientation input to obtain a robust heading estimate. To study this, we performed behavioral experiments in a tightly controlled indoor arena. This revealed that the beetles register directional information provided by the sun and the wind and can use them in a weighted manner. Moreover, the directional information can be transferred between these 2 sensory modalities, suggesting that they are combined in the spatial memory network in the beetle's brain. This flexible use of compass cue preferences relative to the prevailing visual and mechanosensory scenery provides a simple, yet effective, mechanism for enabling precise compass orientation at any time of the day.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.